We’re fairly infested with ladybugs around here. I don’t mind one or two crawling about, but no joke, I’m running across groups of them everyday.

I’ve found that the best way to dispose of them is to vacuum them up with a Dustbuster, with the proper narrow-slotted attachment. That way, you avoid having to swat them or scoop them up, which necessitates having to touch them, which means you wind up with their foul-smelling, defense-mechanism odor on you.

What’s the deal with such a stench coming out of a such daintily-named insect, anyway? Seems incongruous. I had suspected that this was an instance of contradictory naming: Giving an appealing name to something that’s otherwise repellent, along the lines of the Iceland-Greenland historical misnomering.

For that to be the case, there’d have to be a corresponding nice-smelling bug with an odious name. I instantly thought of the stinkbug as the likeliest candidate. But no such luck — turns out that that critter is appropriately named for the smelly secretions it emits.

But not the ladybug. I guess it lucked out in the zoological PR game.